Angela Kelly: Hello, Empowered Principals. Welcome to episode 461. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not-so-typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach Angela Kelly. 

Hey there, Empowered Principals. I’ve got something to share with you. I have a brand new program called The Empowered School. We’re launching on October 27th. We’re taking Empowered Principals who want to lead empowered school cultures. This will be a leadership experience for intentionally cultivating an empowered school culture. 

One of the things that I coach on the most is around the culture of the school. How people think, how they feel, how they behave, the words they say, the actions, their mood, their attitudes. I coach on the interactions between the humans on campus more than any other topic that we coach on. Yes we definitely teach all of the skillset. But the art of building and cultivating a healthy and vibrant culture is the skill of a highly effective Empowered Principal. I hope you will join us for The Empowered School. The registration link is in the show notes. We’ll see you October 27th. 

Hello, my Empowered Principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. I’ve got a great episode for you today. I had a conversation with a new friend and colleague of mine. His name is Steve McMahon. We met very recently, had a wonderful meet and greet conversation. You’ll hear all about Steve and what he offers. I moved this podcast up because one of the things that my clients and people who are reaching out to me ask about the most is how to deal with intense behaviors, whether that’s from a student, most often, but also can be from adults in the room, the adults on campus, families that you work with, even perhaps district or school board members.

When it comes to intense behaviors, principals need to know, one, how to act, two, what to do, three, how to stay calm themselves, and a system that works consistently. Steve has worked in this line of business for almost his entire life. He has an incredible backstory. You’ll hear all about it on this episode, but I want to highlight something in advanced. I want you to listen to the approach that he teaches, the approach that he takes in the schools that he works with. It is about culture. It is about connection. It is about humanity.

And if there’s anything that this podcast brings to the table is, I say this in the podcast as well, I don’t understand how we aren’t prioritizing the humanity of education, the connection required of students for students, between students and students, students and adults, and adults to adults. Enhancing the culture means enhancing connections. It’s focusing on how we’re feeling and how we want to feel.

So enjoy this podcast. I’m teaching a new program on the Empowered Culture dropping this week, but Steve has a very specific program that he teaches. I want you to listen to it, sign up for it, at least read his book. He has it. The links are going to be in the show notes. This is a high-power, high-impact interview. I think you will enjoy it. I think it will be extremely relevant, and you know that you have resources available to you through Steve’s work with mindset management and through my work, the Empowered Principal®. Have a beautiful week. Stay empowered. Be well.

Hello, Empowered Principals. Welcome to today’s episode. I have a very special guest. I am so excited to have this conversation, so excited, in fact, that I moved podcast episodes around so that this would drop as soon as possible. I have with me here today, Steve McMahon. He helps schools with intense behaviors.

And can anybody raise their hand? Can anybody relate to this? And when I met him, we met online, but we have a meet and greet. As you guys know, I meet and greet with everybody and immediately within five minutes I was like, Steve, this is a yes. We need this service in our schools right now. We need more people to know about it and talk about it. So I have Steve here with me today. Steve, welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast.

Steve McMahon: Well, thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited about this opportunity and it was such a joy meeting with you as well last week.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Yes. We had such a wonderful chat. And I was telling Steve, you know, I meet people because I value authenticity, connection, transparency. I value connection. I value people, people forward. And I don’t ever want this podcast to be a stream of solicitation. I don’t want it to be a commercial, you know, just one after the next. I want it to be about us as human beings here helping the human beings who are in schools.

That’s what this is about. It’s about the humanity of our work. It’s about human development. It’s about leading actual human beings. And so Steve and I really connected deeply on that level and that’s why I do the meet and greets because I want to know who’s the real deal out there and Steve is one of those guys. So Steve, can you tell us a little bit about…

Steve McMahon: Thank you.

Angela Kelly: Oh, you’re so welcome. I’m so delighted. Can you tell us a little bit about your background? Just let people come up to speed with who you are, what you do.

Steve McMahon: I told Angela last week when we met, you know, I was one of those kids who growing up in the 1970s was not a very good student in school. In the 1970s, we had a lot of fun in school. I wasn’t very prone to being what you would call a good student. And so fortunately I was able to leave school, graduated high school, went to the United States Navy, spent four years in the United States Navy figuring myself out and learning how to be. And then I had a calling to work with youth. I knew that right from the very beginning of my service career.

And I went to college to become what I thought would be a youth minister in church, and I decided halfway through that that wasn’t my calling. It was obvious that I was to be called to work with kids who had significant, severe emotional and behavioral disorders. And so my college advisor told me at one point, you should become a public school teacher because that’s where they all are. And he was absolutely right. He was absolutely right. So I became a public school teacher in the early 90s. In fact, my first year was 1989-90 school year and I was a fifth-grade school teacher.

And at that point, it was after school had already begun in a very small school district, and they gathered together all of their fifth-grade teachers and they said, we got this young man coming in to become a teacher. He’s certified and we’re going to hire him. And I need you to pick four kids out of each of your classes to create a new class for this guy. So I got those kids. I got a lot of kids who other people had not necessarily given up on, but didn’t know what to do with. And that led me down the path of going into special education. So I became a resource teacher for students with emotional and behavior disorders. I got my master’s degree in that field.

And then I was recruited to go to work for a specialized program in the state of Georgia. We had 27 programs around the state at that time, and they were called the Georgia Psychoeducational Network. Now, fortunately, the name has been changed to Georgia Network of Educational and Therapeutic Supports. And so it was a specialized program. I began as a young man, a young teacher working with kids with significant problems and discovered a calling that was right up my alley. It was exactly what I needed to be, exactly what I needed to do.

And unfortunately in the 90s, there was very little training in this field. There was Nicholas Long’s Life Space Crisis interviews was there. Mary Margaret Woods developmental therapy model and things like that, which we learned from. But basically it was a lot of on-the-job training. What do you do when kids go off? What they taught us to do when kids go off was to physically restrain them. I was never ever comfortable with that, but that’s what we did. 

Fortunately, in the late 90s, now I was a program manager for this program. I met a man named Marshall Siler. And Marshall was working at a residential facility in Atlanta, and he was trained in a system called Prevention and Management of Aggressive Behavior, which was also another physical containment technique, but it was different. It was different in the proactive measures. It was different in the relationship building.

And Marshall then created a training protocol for schools called Mindset. And now that is what I do. That’s what I’ve been doing for since 1998 when I was trained by him. I transitioned into a role as a district-wide behavior intervention specialist in which I was able to train that program to teachers throughout our district. We had a large district of 46,000 students. And I was traveling from place to place putting out fires and assisting in the professional development of young teachers. 

And I really, really enjoyed that work. But in 2007, I actually created a position in the district where I was part-time for the school district so I could work alongside Marshall training trainers of this approach. And I did. And in 2011, after a series of personal incidents in which were very difficult to deal with, including the death of a spouse, becoming, you know, very intentional about life is too short to not do what you need to do. And so in 2011, I quit my job after 21 years and started working along Marshall full-time, alongside of Marshall full-time.

And then as time goes by, in 2017, unfortunately Marshall passed. And this work was left in my lap. Then the pandemic struck, right? So then we had the pandemic. And after the pandemic, I was able to gather a group of individuals that were seriously devoted to this work. And now we train this work nationwide. 

And it is a curriculum of de-escalation first, of prevention first, of relationship building, of understanding what behavior is as a form of communication and learning how to communicate with behavior to be able to accept the persons who are acting out in a compassionate and empathic way. So that’s in a nutshell, kind of what we do. We train trainers all over the country. There’s thousands of people that have been trained in our in our approach. Seems to be making a difference.

What I like to say these days is it’s no longer a special education thing. It started as a special education thing. But now it is a tier one culture and climate issue that everyone in our country needs to be trained. Everyone in our world needs to be trained how to connect with people who are dysregulated.

Angela Kelly: Yes. You’re doing God’s work. This is the work that I was called to do as well, Steve. So I think this is why we connect on such a deep level. We see the need for community building and for relationship building.

And I want to ask you a question because some of the things I see on social media, some of the posts or some of the comments will say kids are so different. Kids are much harder now. The behaviors are harder now. And I’m wondering what your thoughts are on this because you have the wisdom of a breath of experience, of over decades of experience. So you worked with kids in the 80s, 90s, early 2000s, and now here we are today in the 2020s.

Can you share that wisdom with us in terms of are kids actually behaving differently? And if they are, why do you think that is? But is that absolutely true? Because I think sometimes we throw our hands up in the air saying the kids are too hard these days. So I’m just curious what your thoughts are on that.

Steve McMahon: That’s a great question. One I’m asked very often. And I really would, I’d like to respond by saying this. How long have adults been complaining about kids these days? Because in reality, I think forever, adults have been frustrated with the behavior of youth. 

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: But youth also are frustrated with the responses that they get from the adults in their lives because it’s a very confusing dichotomy really, because you’ve got parents and teachers who are trying to help kids become independent and self-actualized. And when they become independent and self-actualized, they make mistakes. And when they make mistakes, we come down on them. We come down on them in such a way as to punish them for their behaviors, to not allow them to think for themselves. And then we complain that we have high school graduates that are not problem solvers and critical thinkers.

Angela Kelly: Yes. 

Steve McMahon: And so it’s up to us as adults to decide how we respond to the challenges of youth. And I wouldn’t say that youth are any more difficult than they’ve always been, but I do believe wholeheartedly that they’re much more sophisticated than we ever were. And they have the tools in their hands to be able to be more sophisticated. There’s there’s a lot of ways for students to engage with one another and with the outside world that they don’t even know, given the nature of technology.

What I really believe in my heart when drives this work is that kids crave connection. Adults also crave connection, but it needs to be authentic. And I think these days in particular, students are experiencing a lot of inauthentic connection and it’s resulting in a lack of trust, a lack of trust with adults, a lack of trust with one another. 

And it’s my understanding that kids are throwing themselves under the bus in their social media, which we never had to deal with. I mean, we had rumors and we had notes on the walls and writings on the bathroom wall and what not, but we never had social media. It’s a completely different dynamic. It doesn’t mean that they’re more difficult now than they were before. It’s just sophisticated. 

I was a difficult child. I was a kid who was hard to connect with. I was one of those kids who rejected authority. I was one of those kids who got in trouble with the with the law even in high school. You know, fortunately there were pathways for me. But unfortunately these days, students with the same types of behaviors that I was experiencing in school continue to get, you know, moved out and there’s limited amounts of opportunities for them because, you know, for me it was the military, whereas I know these days, it’s really difficult to be able to qualify to be in the military.

Angela Kelly: Yes. 

Steve McMahon: So where do they go? What do they do? How do we help them be who they need to be? 

Angela Kelly: Yes. Yes. You’re so right about that. So it is true when people are discussing how kids are different these days, that social media is a new level that, you know, a new platform that we have never had to integrate into our raising of children, our, like, developing children. And so that is something we are learning, especially when they are so savvy in it and us people who have grew up in the 70s did not have it. You know, we’re kind of always catching up to it and so we are meeting it with resistance and frustration and a misunderstanding of, you know, the kids’ experience with it. 

But I do like what you said, like that is a thing and also, this is the land of and here, behaviors are behaviors. So whether somebody is dysregulated from social media or they were dysregulated from being bullied in the back alley, the behaviors are the behaviors because we’re still human. We’re still just as human as we were back in the 70s and 80s, right?

Steve McMahon: And thank God for that, right? And so when we start thinking about how we engage with one another, I think that a lot of people are very concerned about and I am too, about the lack of personal engagement that people have. And that’s why I’m grateful for where I live. I live in a rural North Georgia mountains where we have a very small community and the community is deeply connected with one another. It’s nice to see what happens in the schools and the rec department and the various opportunities that people have to get together. I can’t imagine what it was like or what it is like to live in a large city these days because of the fear that exists about allowing children to play unsupervised and such.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: So we had all that growing up too that kids these days just don’t have. We’re hyper vigilant about our supervision of our children and we should be. And we also are very exhausted as adults because we’re toting our kids all over the place to make sure that they get the socialization that they need. And there’s all of the sports, all of the drama things, all of the band things. I mean, I’ve never seen families as busy as I’ve seen them these days.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Yes. They have their kids in a lot of things in order to create safe social situations that are in real person.

Steve McMahon: Yes.

Angela Kelly: Because people do treat one another differently when they’re face to face versus when they are on a screen, so to speak, or they’re just anonymously making, you know, comments and following an energy that’s online, you know, something viral that’s happening. So I have a lot of fairly new principals out there, or I have people who are new, they tend to be new in their position, right? Whether that’s at a district level or at a site level. 

For these principals, and veterans we’ll get to you in a minute here, but I want to like, I want to give our little new birdies a chance here to, you know, I’m thinking if I were a brand new principal, when I was a brand new principal and I was struggling, one, everything felt like a priority. I didn’t know which way was left. I didn’t know which way to turn. So I was playing whack-a-mole. 

And number two, I had a strategy in my classroom for me personally that I learned how that learned in my classroom to work for me. But when I became a school leader, that strategy doesn’t necessarily apply at a school-wide level. So I found myself kind of really uncertain about how to handle things outside of an environment that I had created.

Steve McMahon: Right.

Angela Kelly: So to our new principals out there, what might you say are some high quality, high leverage actions or decisions that they can take to set themselves on a good foot with their the culture of their school, the relationships with their students, and their highest risk behavior needs?

Steve McMahon: It’s a very loaded question, but a very good question as well.

Angela Kelly: It is. I know.

Steve McMahon: It’s a lot. But I, you know, we base our everything that we teach on four guiding principles. And I think one of the things that we need to make sure everyone has and every school has are your core values. And what are your core values and how do you display those core values? And I think that’s part of the whole climate and culture piece. Sometimes we think we have core values and yet our behaviors demonstrate otherwise. 

So what do we value as school? And of course we value academic excellence, right? How do we gain academic excellence without having psychological safety for all people? And I when I say all people, I mean all staff as well, because we know where we’re also in a day and age in which it’s really hard to recruit teachers and it’s very difficult to keep teachers. And so our mindset philosophies from mindset safety management are very simple. It’s like promoting choice and trust, avoiding power struggles, seeking proaction versus reaction and setting everyone up for success. 

So what does it mean to set everyone up for success in an environment where perhaps they don’t feel like they’ve been set up for success in the past? A lot of that has to do with what are we really all about? And what we’re all about is assisting generations to come. How are we helping students become who they need to be in order for them to thrive? And when you’re talking about the intense behaviors, those children with intense behaviors often feel the burden of and the weight of I’m the disruptive ones. 

I’m the ones who you have to pay attention to, otherwise, you know, I’m going to raise heck around here and other kids aren’t going to learn. And so there’s a lot of my thoughts that go back to what are those students need the most? And what they need the most is someone to connect with them, you know, someone to be there, some trusted adult, somebody who’s not going to judge them for who they are, and someone who’s going to accept their behaviors for what that is, and that is a form of communication about unmet needs.

When we stop thinking about children who are attention seekers and start thinking of them about children who are seeking connection, our entire framework will change in terms of how we treat them. So it’s not a punishment, it’s an intervention that needs to take place before the behavior actually gets to be disruptive to the point of it being, you know, disciplinary actions being taken.

So I think part of it is my role. What is my role? I think that’s a huge question for every administrator to ask. What is my role? And you are probably in the, you’re in the hot seat because from the district level, you have responsibilities from your bosses who tell you what to do and how to do it and when to do it. And you have responsibility for those that work for you because you’ve got to help them and support them in doing what they need to do for the sake of every child in the classroom. You also have all of the people in the community pointing a finger of shame and blame towards you when things don’t go well. So, you know, who am I and what is my role?

Angela Kelly: Yes. And that’s what I’m here to do, help you guys. And I know Steve helps you at this level. He’s training, do you train actually administrators and teachers or do you train the people who like intervention specialists?

Steve McMahon: Everyone under the sun. Anybody and everybody who is willing to learn our curriculum to redeliver it to others, we welcome them. 

Angela Kelly: Okay. Understand.

Steve McMahon: It doesn’t have to be someone with a PhD, but we do require someone to have a GED in order to do this. But I think that the work communicates throughout the entire spectrum. How to help people figure out their stuff. So one of the nicest things about the mindset training curriculum is it’s really a freedom when we teach people how to do this because honestly, you don’t have to come up with any answers.

Angela Kelly: Right.

Steve McMahon: You’re not there to solve anyone’s problem. You’re just there to hear them out. So when someone walks in the office, for example, on a Monday morning and she doesn’t want to go to class and she’s 36 and she’s a teacher, she needs to be heard. She needs to be seen. What’s going on? And you know what? She may not need to be in that classroom today. But what else is going on? What’s driving that feeling? What’s the root cause of that behavior? And really, whose problem is it? It’s not yours, it’s hers. And how do we help her figure out her pathway towards success? 

And it’s really not that hard. It’s a four-step model that we teach of, like I said, acknowledgement, acceptance, validation, and empowerment. And it’s it’s deep. It’s also based in neurology and understanding the human brain and knowing how and when to intervene, knowing how and when to accept the fact that that’s irrational behavior and she’s thinking or he’s thinking down a pathway, they’re not necessarily thinking right right now. And that is the truth. They’re not. And so if we think we’re going to get logical, rational conversations with somebody who’s not in their rational brain, then we need to rethink how our responses need to be, reshape our responses that is.

Angela Kelly: Yeah, yes. Can you walk us through like a story or an example of a student you’ve worked with or a school that you’ve worked with? Just I want to give listeners some context here as to what this might look like in real time.

Steve McMahon: Well, you know, the thing is when you’re talking about administrators in the office space, they’re likely already doing these things. But I’ll never forget this one moment back in like, I guess it was around the mid 2000s, like 2005 or thereabouts. And I walked into a program, the program I used to manage. And now I’m doing the district-wide behavior job. And every time I got to a space doing that job where I needed to find my bearings, I would always go back to my specialized program and hang out there with staff there and help those kids.

But I walked in there, there was a student who was in the sixth grade, we’ll call him Johnny for the sake of anonymity, but Johnny was in the corner. He was refusing to get up. He was angry. He had thrown things around. And it was time to get ready to go to the cafeteria for lunch. And the teachers directed him to clean up his things so that he could get ready to go to lunch as well. And he told them to F off. I’m not doing anything that you people say. 

And he was just in that stage, you know? And I told him, “Look, I’m fine. I’ll I’ll how about this? I’ll hang out with him. You guys just go and you let me know how we’re we’re I’ll if you get bring his lunch back or I’ll take him later, you know, one or the other.” So they left and they went down to the cafeteria. And I stayed in that classroom and I was just silent. And at that time, it was the age of flip phones. Remember flip phones?

Angela Kelly: Oh yes.

Steve McMahon: Remember the little skinny Motorola flip phones?

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: So, I actually had two phones. I had one that was my personal cell phone. I also had one that was my office, my business cell phone, my from my district. And so I walked over near the file cabinet where he was and I put my work cell phone on the top of that file cabinet, turned around and walked back and sat at the desk. And he was about 15 feet away from me. And I said, “Hey Johnny, I’ll tell you what, if that phone rings, will you answer it?” And he did. I called that phone. He was refusing to talk with anybody. He was sitting there for about 10 to 15 minutes, not doing anything. And the phone rang. He answered the phone. And I said, “Hey Johnny, I see that you’ve answered the phone. You’re standing by the file cabinet and it seems like you’ve been pretty angry for some time.”

And he spoke to me on the phone while we were both in the same room. And you could see his behavior declining so long as he was beginning to talk. And all he was doing was telling his story. And all I was doing was saying, “Yeah, that’s really hard. That’s really hard.” And so it happened again. “Yeah, it happened again.” I mean, he’s going on and on and on. And then next thing you know, he was fine. He cleaned up his area that he had made a mess in, and he and I together walked down to lunch. It was great because it wasn’t about shame, it wasn’t about blame. 

It was about acceptance and acknowledgement and validation. He had every right to feel the way that he felt because when he told me the story from his perspective, he was being treated unfairly. He was being unjustly accused of things. And so whether or not that be true is irrelevant, right? Because all my goal was just to calm him down. So we calmed it down. I said, “What do you want to do?” He said, “I want to go to lunch.” So we went to lunch. We came back from lunch. He got back engaged in class and everything was fine. 

And I was talking about 10 minutes later with ladies in the social work office and there was a knock at the door and they answered the door and it was him. And they said, what do you need? He says, I’m waiting for another phone call. And I said, what phone call? He said, you need to, the phone call that tells me I did a really good job calming down. And I said, “Gotcha. Go back to class.” So I went to the front office and I said to the receptionist, I need you to do an all call. I’m going to call your phone, you do an all call and tell him that he has a phone call in the front office.

And so that one interaction with that one kid in that one way, every time I saw him from that point forward, our relationship was cool. Everybody else could have been angry and mad and everybody else is just a jerk. But Mr. Steve, he’s the cool one. And you know, we have assistant principals all over the country that know these kids to that level. 

And I don’t know if you saw this, but on social media recently, there was a principal of a high school in Lake in Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia that their kids actually staged a fight in the cafeteria. And he went running from his office to the cafeteria and it was videotaped by other kids. The entire time it was just a prank. He held one of these kids in the way that I taught him to hold this kid. And then when he turned around, the entire cafeteria broke out into happy birthday and they sang their principal a happy birthday.

Angela Kelly: Oh, yes. I saw that.

Steve McMahon: That man’s name is Mr. Bobby Davis and he’s been trained in our mindset approach for the past 15 years. He’s a wonderful human being. Loves those kids. And you can see the climate of that building love they love him as well. That’s what I want to see schools be. I want to see schools be a place where the students and the and the staff are that connected. And Bobby’s made that happen. And a lot of, I believe a lot of it’s because of how he changed his routine, if you will, once he learned our curriculum. That district has 16 schools. And in that district, every time someone becomes an assistant principal, they become a trainer of mindset. That’s just the way they do business with us.

Angela Kelly: That’s wonderful.

Steve McMahon: So they have shaped their climate and their culture of their school district based on our partially based on our curriculum.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Yes.

Steve McMahon: I just love that.

Angela Kelly: They have applied that curriculum with, you know, consistency and intention and that’s really what makes the difference.

Steve McMahon: It’s not easy.

Angela Kelly: No, it’s not easy. So I want to ask you something because I’m thinking what a listener’s thinking right now and they’re like, oh, in the story that you just told, what makes that so wonderful is that there was an outside person to come in who was very trained and skilled in the technique. So Johnny didn’t have any negative association with Steve. Johnny, like this guy was coming in as a neutral person. 

So when a teacher’s had a conflict and now teacher’s dysregulated and there’s been an entanglement, right? Teacher’s dysregulated and Johnny’s dysregulated, teacher might not necessarily be able to be the one if there’s been an entanglement where they are the de-escalator. But so that’s where the principal or the dean of students or the vice principal can come in and say, and be this calm, more neutral.

Steve McMahon: Or how about this? What about another teacher? How about the teachers just swap out for a few moments? How about somebody in the hallway? Because in the in the book I wrote Transformative Crisis Management, there’s some scenarios in here as well. And those who are trained well in this de-escalation protocol, they know that they can walk into any situation if they can remain calm. 

But if you weren’t there in the beginning, you don’t have all those feelings associated with it. But if we’ve trained our staff properly, then tapping out is appropriate. And we need to tap out long before we start losing it ourselves. One of the best intervention strategies I’ve ever recommended for any principal and teacher is the teacher calls too late. We know that. By the time they call the office, it’s already too late because that relationship has been damaged.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: But what if we see these kids when they walk in the morning differently and you start watching and you start thinking about the nervous system as a surveillance system, which is taught to us by Stephen Porges in the polyvagal theory. We think about what do these kids look like when they come in the morning? And I got to know, I need to I need to get near Angela today. Something’s up with Angela. I can tell there’s something going on. 

So why not do it earlier rather than wait for the incident to occur? So how about calling the office and saying, I need assistance in room 222 and somebody comes to your room and instead of them taking the child out of the room, they instead take your place as the instructor in the classroom and you walk out with that kid. You go out and take a walk. You go sit on a bench with this child for about five minutes. 

And I want people to understand too is we’re not trying to teach teachers to be mental health therapists. It’s not our role nor is it theirs, but most of them feel that way at one time or another these days. I wasn’t trained as a therapist. I’m like, I know, we’re not trying to teach you to be a therapist. What I want you to do is what I call emotional triage.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: You’re doing emotional triage every morning. And you know who else can do that? Bus drivers. 

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: And people who greet and meet kids every morning and people who sit in lunchrooms while students are having breakfast.

Angela Kelly: Yup, the breakfast program.

Steve McMahon: You know, these are times, these are prime opportunities, especially on a Monday morning to know what’s gone on over the weekend.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: And we know that kids who are committed and engaged for the social well-being of one another and for the climate and the culture of the school, they come in already talking to us about what happened over the weekend. They’re not the ones I’m so concerned about though.

Angela Kelly: Yes. 

Steve McMahon: And it’s really unfortunate that we’re talking about this today because in Bend, Oregon last week, 

Angela Kelly: Yes. 

Steve McMahon: Again, it’s happened in America where someone had walked in and killed innocent children and adults in a school building.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: And I think where are we for these kids that how is it that someone can do that? It’s an evil time in which we live. How do we help students like that? 

Angela Kelly: Yes, that was my question to you. I think we’d be a miss not to bring it up because it did just happen. I did record a separate podcast on it with my own thoughts around how to support people in crisis. And I was thinking about this conversation, Steve, because it’s happened between the time that we met and the time that we’re speaking now. And it was a special education student from that school. 

And I can’t recall the stats, so I’m not going to quote the stats, but there is a significant number of when you do the research on school crisis like these, it’s a student that is the perpetrator. And I thought about you and I was wondering your take on that because clearly for every behavior, there is a reason to that person, whether it’s rational to us on the outside or not. But there are thoughts, there are feelings, and there are reasons, rationales in their mind to make that decision and then to go forward with it. What are your thoughts about just that aspect of what happened in Ben and in so many other communities?

Steve McMahon: And it happens everywhere, you know? And what I say about our mindset technique too is it can change the trajectory of a person’s life. A moment, a brief moment of contact. And I think about it when I hear the stories of what happens in situations like Bend and elsewhere is could someone have intervened prior to him getting to that school? 

And someone did try to intervene. He was shooting at people out on the street before he ever got to the school. The evidence is, if someone were to have stepped in as he was leaving the apartment, as he was leaving the house and said, “Hey, I see you. It seems like you’re having a really bad day today. What’s up with this?” Maybe that would have been enough. Who knows? But we’ll never know in situations like that.

Angela Kelly: No. 

Steve McMahon: But, you know, it breaks my, first and foremost, it just breaks my heart every time things like this happen. It just tears me apart on the inside. And I feel for those families and for the whole community. And I feel also for our educational community as a whole because, you know, when Parkland happened in Florida, it’s interesting because I was in a sixth grade classroom in a middle school in the district that I used to work with doing a consultation. 

And I said to this sixth grade group of teachers, you know, it’s not the, it’s the kids in the shadows that I worry about the most. It’s the kids who lurk and they’re not connected, they’re not engaged, they’re not, who’s paying attention to these children? Who’s, which adults are they connected to in the building? And do we even know their names? Have we gone out of our way to make sure that they’re also included in whatever way we can to this entire dynamic of feeling a sense of belonging? Being a part of something bigger than themselves? 

And on that very afternoon, it was Valentine’s Day and I walked out of that school, got in my car to go home and I heard the news of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. I remember the day, I remember when Columbine happened. I was teaching in the classroom at that time as well. You know, our whole world changed.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: But a good response to it has been the hardwired hardware, if you will, of school security. And I know I’m really grateful for school security. And there were more fences, there’s more ways to check, there’s cameras everywhere, there’s buzz-ins. But as we saw the other day, it didn’t matter, did it? So the bigger picture is how do we keep people from becoming that person? How do we how do we engage with our community? And it, you know, it’s not just kids either. How do we engage with one another to, blessed are the peacemakers, right?

Angela Kelly: Yes. I think that’s what makes the work you’re doing, the work that I’m doing so relevant. I honestly don’t know what else could be more of a priority right now in our schools than the work that you’re doing, the work that I’m doing, which is teaching people de-escalation, teaching them regulation, co-regulation, helping them understand, going internal data, using neuroscience. I don’t understand why we haven’t shifted that into the number one priority in our schools.

Steve McMahon: That’s a legislative problem. And when we talk about, and our in our curriculum, we are intentional about talking about barriers to creating this culture of prevention in which we seek. And we tell people all the time, our foundational approach needs to be trained every person in every building across the nation. Of course, we’re not going to train our physical containment techniques with everybody. Those are very specific techniques for very specific environments and for crisis intervention teams. We have those already established. 

What we really need to do is create a priority for the foundation of de-escalation. And some districts are working toward that end. Some districts have this embedded in their five-year strategic plan. And they’re using our services to do so. And we have trained trainers in those buildings. But when I talk with our trainers, they’re very concerned in that they’re not given the time to train it well.

And I’m like, well, you know, it needs to be an embedded ongoing conversation. It needs to be embedded in a professional learning community. It needs to be something that’s continuously talked about. It needs to be something that we talk with one another about when we’re having our problems too, because it’s not just a teacher to student issue. It’s a person to person issue, as you said from the very beginning. It’s a human thing. How do we help someone who’s having a difficult time with whatever it might be? 

And some of it could be financial burdens. Some of it could be living in situations where there’s domestic violence occurring. Some of it could be drug abuse or family members who have been diagnosed with something. It could be a child having been hit by a car. It could be the death of a spouse, the death of a parent. It’s hard enough just to be human, right?

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: So when you’re also expecting that very person to stand in front of 28 to 35 students every day and help these kids try to achieve academic excellence, it’s a lot. It’s it’s just a lot. And we know that when care is prioritized, I remember back in the day when I was doing the work in the district and we were at a faculty meal, we’re all family here. I’m like, yeah, but there are plenty of dysfunctional families and we also look like one as well. I want to say this too, that our work family, our what the people that we work around can be the most supportive of us personally. 

And I experienced that tremendously when my wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2008. I was again, I was working part-time for the school district at that time. My boss called me the very next morning and she said, Steve, you need to come back to work full-time. And I was like, Debbie, wait, she was just, Cindy was just diagnosed with cancer. And she was like, I know, I know, but you don’t understand, we cannot provide for you FMLA as a part-time employee, but we can as a full-time employee and the board’s redrawing your contract and you’re going to come sign it so that we can help you take care of your family.

Angela Kelly: Oh.

Steve McMahon: And I was, I didn’t know because I’m pretty naive about business, right? So I didn’t know that was such a big deal until about a year ago when I was speaking at a conference and somebody came up to me and said, that was the dumbest business decision I’ve ever heard of, that for a district to do that. And I said, well, you know what? I don’t think it was a business decision, was it?

Angela Kelly: No. 

Steve McMahon: You know, it was because of love. It was because of care and because of compassion. And if we can be motivated by those things, then I think the world will be a much better place. 

Angela Kelly: I agree 100%. So Steve, if there’s like, I always ask this at the end of the interview, if there’s one piece of wisdom, if you could like package up some wisdom that you have and give it as a gift to every school leader out there. What would it be? What would you say? What would you tell them? What would you share?

Steve McMahon: I think that’s a really, you know, it’s a good way to end this kind of conversation. I really want people to understand that there’s so much out of your control that really frees up your spirit to be able to say, you know what? It’ll all work out. And I think about the pressure and the and the concerns of a school administrator and it’s absolutely huge. I know that. And there’s a lot of responsibility. There’s a lot of concern I have for you as well as a school administrator because you got to take care of you. I think that’s probably primarily important that we need to be focused on our own personal well-being. 

And we need to surround ourselves with people who care. We need to surround ourselves with people who are able to listen when we’re frustrated. We need to be able to be honest and transparent and authentic. But I say this to my people that work with me all the time. I’m like, once you realize that I don’t control anything other than how I respond to everything, it is really it’s very freeing in my spirit. It’s very easy to say, it’ll all work out. And it may not work out the way you want it to work out. It may not work out according to your particular plan, but if you just will let go sometimes and see where it’s going to go and if you surround yourself by the right people, it typically works out pretty well.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Yes.

Steve McMahon: And also have grace for yourself.

Angela Kelly: Oh. 

Steve McMahon: As much as we talk about forgiving others and applying grace to others, I want you to look in the mirror and also apply that to yourself. That it’s okay that we’ve had some mistakes. It’s okay that there have been some bumps in the road.

Angela Kelly: Yes. Because that’s a part of the ride. It’s a part of this journey. And I think when we that was so beautifully said. And I think that when we get into a pickle, we resist it. We think it shouldn’t be happening. We think kids shouldn’t have emotional reactions or that there shouldn’t be intense behaviors. That’s part of the problem is we’re resisting the reality of the human experience. But when we just go, “Oh, they’re having a human moment, that’s triggering me. I’m having a human moment. I need a phone call, right? I need someone to call me on the phone. 

Steve McMahon: But you know how about if you can recognize that’s going on, if you can sense that yourself, you’re also becoming dysregulated, it’s really nice to have colleagues who are trained in the same things. Because we talk about mindset training helping the district or the school have a common language. And so a common language to help people in crisis or help people in conflict. 

And if I’m trained in the same things you’re trained in and I walk over to you Angela and I say, it looks like you need to go get in your car. And you were trained in our curriculum, you would recognize that acronym as being this, calm, aware, and respectful. Stay in your car. And if you can’t, you don’t need to be the one with this kid right now. If you can’t, someone else needs to step in, which requires humility on your part.

Angela Kelly: Yes.

Steve McMahon: So that’s what embedded in our curriculum are all of these nuances. It’s just, I am blessed to be able to, I say to people all the time, I have a charmed life now because I was able to walk away from everything and just do what I’m passionate about. And fortunately, what I’m passionate about is helping others become well. So it’s a, it’s a nice job, if you want to call it a job.

Angela Kelly: It’s a wonderful job, especially in the field of education. It’s a calling for sure. It’s a lifestyle, not a job, as they say.

Steve McMahon: Definitely. Yeah.

Angela Kelly: Definitely. It was such a pleasure to have you, Steve. I am so delighted to have met you and to know this work. This podcast has just brought me to connecting with so many people, but you’re just such a gem. 

Thank you, Empowered Principals. That’s it for today. We could probably go on for hours talking about this, but if you have more questions, you have concerns, you want to connect with Steve, all of that information, all of the links will be down in the show notes. Please check him out, check out the work. Especially if you are feeling like this is a priority for you, if it’s time to take this on, if you’re ready to get the training you need and deserve and your staff and your students, this is the real deal. So please check out Steve’s work. Have the most empowered week and we’ll see you guys all next week. Take good care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.

Hello, Empowered Principals. Welcome to episode 459. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not-so-typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach Angela Kelly. 

Well hello, my Empowered Principals. Welcome to the podcast. 459, when I said that out loud, wow, that really struck me. That’s a lot of episodes. We’ve been here on this show and this podcast in the world of the Empowered Principal®. So if you are new here, welcome. And you know what? If you have been listening to this for the last eight or nine years, thank you. 

Thank you so much for being here every single week. I often welcome in our new principals and our new listeners, but I don’t take the time to really thank my long-term listeners. I’m so sorry. I love you all so very much. This is why I do the podcast. I do it for you. So if you are a listener from the very beginning, or you’ve been in here for a few years, thank you. I appreciate it so, so very much. So we’re going to dive right in today.

I want to talk about data. Do you have PTSD when I say the word data? I know I do. So, we’re going to talk about data. We have a lot of thoughts about it, don’t we? We have beliefs, opinions, a lot of feelings about data. Some of us love it. Most of us hate it. I’m raising my hand. But let’s talk about it. Let’s make it make sense, okay?

I looked it up in the dictionary because we throw the word data around quite generously in the field of education. And the dictionary says that data is defined as information in visible form. And I found that interesting because to me that means that just about everything around us is data. Like the weather’s data. It tells us what’s happening in the atmosphere right now. Traffic is data. It tells us, hey, people are on the road. There’s a lot of traffic, a lot of cars. 

And because of that, we make it mean and we assume that it’s going to take a little bit longer to get to work than it does when there is less traffic or you know, you look on your GPS, when you see red, you know that means traffic and that means a slowdown and that means more time. So we are inundated with data. Our phones, our computers, oh my gosh. We are on data overload. We get emails, we’ve got the calendars, we’ve got all the apps, social media. Oh, and phone calls, that the one thing we probably use our phone for the least is a phone call. That’s a form of data.

So everything around us is data. And I consider this data in visible form, right? That form of data, I call that external data. It’s information that comes from outside of us. It is external from us and we’re taking it in, we’re consuming it. It is input going into our brains and into our bodies.

And in education, boy, are we inundated with data. Gosh, you know, just thinking about it, I’m just was so over it. I just got so tired and overwhelmed and kind of just sick of it. We were told data must drive instruction. Data is the answer to what we need to do next, that decisions should be data-driven. We have so much data in education. We don’t have the time nor the space to analyze all the data we collect.

And we’ve all been there. You guys know that feeling of analysis paralysis. We talk about this. We’ve talked about this for decades in education. The more that technology has come into existence and the faster it can collect data, the more data we have. And we are notorious. We spin out and we actually waste so much time analyzing data. We talk about it all the time: attendance data, behavior data, academic data. And we should, because it does give us information to make decisions. We want to make informed decisions. We don’t want to have no data or lack data. It’s hard to make decisions. I get it.

But if we’re being very honest with ourselves, there is so much external data that we collect and we dissect. We spend so much time collecting it and dissecting it that it’s not as informative as we’d like it to be. Meaning, we have all this data, we’re looking at it. Teachers are looking at it. We’re moving it around, we’re putting it on spreadsheets, and we’re not really sure what it means or why it’s happening or what to do about it. So we’re making guesses. 

And it’s part of the reason that we have just so much information overload. Can you imagine like being a student right now? If the principals are overloaded, the district staff’s overloaded, teachers are overloaded, can you imagine how kids feel? Like think of how much information and data they’re taking in their little worlds. It’s crazy.

And we have decision fatigue. We have data fatigue. Can you imagine how kids must feel? We spend so much time and effort looking at different numbers. When we spend all this energy trying to decipher what it means, what we should do, what’s the right thing to do, what’s the next best thing to do, what’s the priority? And depending on what we make that data mean, generally speaking, it’s not very fun because when we look at data, we’re not looking at celebration data. 

We kind of push that to the side. We look at the data that tells us the kids that aren’t doing well and the students who aren’t coming to school and the teachers who aren’t performing and the schools that aren’t performing and everyone’s looking around like we want to pick the school that’s got all the pretty A pluses and stars. We don’t want to go to that school that’s got B’s and C’s or even D’s or however they’re rating your school these days.

But we get caught in a catch-22 with data. We’re told as educators, as school leaders, as teachers, we need it. It is essential to make decisions and action plans. And then, at the same time when those plans that we created based on the data, don’t create the results that we want, then we’re told we used the wrong data or we misinterpreted the data or we didn’t use the right data, or we didn’t use it at all. And we just go around and around and we blame data. We use data, we spend time on data. We use it as a crutch.

But here’s the thing with external data. This is my opinion. So here’s the thing with external data. For every human who’s looking at it, every individual has a different way of collecting the data, analyzing the data, and interpreting it. Data means different things to different people. Some people will care about certain kinds of data more than other kinds of data. So they’re going to focus over there on that data. People will focus on and collect the data that is meaningful to them.

And why do we do this? Because we’re humans, because of what we make that external data mean and how that interpretation makes us feel every single time. So we will avoid data that doesn’t feel good, and we’ll collect data that feels a little bit better or we get hyper-focused on attendance data over academics. If they’re not here to learn, then we can’t teach them. And other people are like, but look at, you know, maybe kids don’t want to come because look at the academics and maybe we’re looking at this data about once they’re here. So if you think about data and it gives you the shudders, it’s because there’s so much meaning attached and so many feelings around external data.

But this is my stance and I will stand on this hill until somebody proves me wrong or I find another truth. But until then, we are not going to change the external data, meaning we’re not going to change attendance rates, we’re not going to change graduation rates or test scores or kids getting promoted or the number of kids on grade level. We are not going to change that kind of data or even like teacher surveys and their happiness and the culture and all of that. We are not going to change that external data until we understand our internal data.

Internal data is the information we receive from the inside, from our minds, from our bodies, from our hearts, from our souls. Your mind has thoughts. It has belief systems with deep, deep roots. It has interpretations of things, opinions of things, perspectives of things. Your body, it has data. I need to sleep, I need to wake up, I need to move, I need to rest, I need to play. I’m in pain, I’m in hunger, I am full, I am thirsty, I’m hot, I’m cold. It’s giving you data internally. Our heart emotions, how we feel, what feels aligned for us, what we value. Our heart tells us this feels good, this doesn’t feel good. 

This feels true, this doesn’t feel true. This feels aligned, this doesn’t feel aligned. Our soul, it’s the compass inside that there’s a knowing that goes beyond external data. We can look at data all day long, but you know how you just know? Your gut tells you something. It’s like, I know the data’s saying this, but I feel this. We don’t allow that portion of internal data to have a voice because people are, you can’t prove it or it’s not visible, it’s not on paper. 

But there’s an internal guidance. There is an internal GPS system that is at play. It’s our gut telling us information. Some people call that intuition. Some say it’s a sixth sense. Whatever you call it, I understand that it sounds woo woo. It sounds a little out there. And I know it can sound like fluff. I used to think that too. I’m a very tangible person. I like proof. I like tangible. I like external.

But however, I have studied this and as I’ve studied highly successful people, because I wanted to become one, I have worked with very highly successful schools, highly successful school leaders, highly successful leaders outside of education and highly successful coaches. Every successful person that I have personally interacted with or every book I have read on leadership, successful schools, when you read stories, whether that’s about coaches coaching their teams to championships, athletes, you know, Olympic athletes making it to the top, getting the gold, they say the same thing. Everyone speaks to this.

So let this sit with you for a minute. There is no moment in your school leadership experience where you have officially arrived. You are going to have moments that feel accomplished, moments where you get to experience something that you were striving for. You guys made it on the, you know, California Distinguished School list. You made it as a Blue Ribbon school, whatever your state says, you know, gives you these little awards that say you’ve arrived. It’s a moment in time. You get that moment. Like people go off and win music awards. Their album goes out, it goes platinum, they get an award for it. It’s a moment in time. 

But if they only celebrate the night they win the award, what is the rest of life like? It’s just there working and grinding and going into the recording studio and having to write and that all that work. If they hate that part of it, and then they hate going on tour, but they’re just trying to get the award. Think about that. That’s a very sad life where you are striving for the award and it’s a fleeting moment.

There is no moment where this work is done, no moment where you have arrived and you land forever, no moment where everything’s finally in place and you can just rest and ride. We are in the business of human development, including our own development. So what we’re talking about here, what education is for is to improve the experience of living as a human on this planet. That’s why we teach kids. We teach them to give them skills and knowledge and information and wisdom and tools and strategies to enhance their experience as a human on this planet, to give them the skill sets they need to live the life they want to live.

And this is up for debate and I could really go into this because, well, my conspiracy theory is that like schools are a way to control and to limit people. I want to break that open. I don’t want you to feel limited. I don’t want your teachers to feel limited. I don’t want students to only have certain access to the potential in their lives. But when it comes down to your life, I care about you. I care about your experience as a school leader. 

My experience was so miserable, I made it the rest of my life’s mission to help other school leaders not be miserable in their lives, to not want to want their job, but to actually desire it, to actually want it, to improve the experience of school leadership by understanding the internal data that’s speaking to us and to understand what it is that we’re actually doing here.

We are here to teach children so that they can enhance their experience. Same is true with our teachers. We don’t want teachers miserable. It’s miserable to work with miserable teachers. Have you realized that? You’ve had that experience. I know I have too. I have been one of the miserable teachers, and I’ve been a miserable principal. My district leaders don’t love miserable principals, even when they are doing things that make our life feel miserable, right? But that’s not the goal.

How can students know if their lives are being enhanced by coming to school? If we don’t tap into their internal data? If we don’t use internal data, if we don’t teach it, if we don’t exercise it ourselves? How can teachers know what they’re doing is working for them and for their students unless they check into their internal data and we allow them to. We have to give permission to talk about internal data.

How can we improve the quality of our own work, our own impact, our leadership without the guidance of our internal compass and doing what feels good for us? You guys, we are here to enjoy this life. Yes, we’re here to lead. Yes, we’re here to support. Yes, we are here to work and offer our talents with the world. Absolutely, yes. But we’re also here to live, to love, to enjoy.

The Empowered Principal® Collaborative is helping leaders just like you learn to enjoy their jobs, actually enjoy their jobs, their lives, their schools, the people that used to drive them crazy. They now understand how to work with them. They have been focusing on what feels good in life and in their career instead of only focusing on what isn’t done yet and what hasn’t yet been fixed. Please, do not wait to enjoy yourself. Do it now. Listen to your internal data. What is it telling you? What do you need physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, financially, spiritually, professionally? What do you need? Ask it.

Your data is so wise. It knows exactly what you need. It knows if you need sleep or not. It knows if you’ve been procrastinating or not. It knows the next best step. And even when you don’t know that, you have a pretty good hunch. Your internal data, I promise you, this external data, it’s a distraction. It wants to keep you distracted, keep you second-guessing, keeping you chasing, keeping you from listening to what actually will guide you. Your internal data will always guide you. 

It guided you to the person you’re with right now. If you’re in a partnership, a marriage, if you are in a relationship, it guided you to that person. It guided you to whether you or not you wanted to have kids or how you’re raising your kids. There’s guidance available there. And all of this external data, it’s just noise. And it’s not that you don’t want to look at it, you can take it in, but the internal data is what’s going to help you decide and cut through all of the data and all of the noise and all of the distraction.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that your job is to swim through all of this external data and that is your job as a principal. That’s distraction in my book. Focus on internal data. You’ll be surprised at how quickly you cut through all the BS and all the distraction and all the noise. Give it a try, my friends. I care about you. I want you to enjoy your school leadership experience. Have a beautiful week. Happy fall, happy principals month. I hope you’re enjoying yourself. And if you missed it, let me know if you are interested in Flip the Fall Dip for the 2026.

And I just realized something. I have a very special announcement. I have a new access for you, especially if you’re incoming and new to my programs and you want to kind of taste test, like you want to go to Baskin Robbins and try the 31 flavors before you pick which one is the right one for you. I have something coming up. I’m not prepped to announce it just yet, but I am so excited. I’m going to leave you with a teaser. And next week, we will put that announcement in the actual podcast so that you can enjoy the new access that you will be gaining very soon. Have a beautiful week. I love you all. Take good care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.

Hello, Empowered Principals. Welcome to episode 457. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not-so-typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach Angela Kelly. 

Well, hello, my Empowered Principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. And hey, if you’re new, we are so happy you are here. I am going to dive right in today because I just got off a call with a client. And we’re diving deep with this client of mine. She is a one-on-one client and also in EPA, which is the Empowered Principal Academy. She’s also in EPC, which is the Empowered Principal Collaborative. So she is here to win. She is here to be empowered, and she’s killing it.

And if there’s anything that I can teach you on this podcast and I can share with you, it’s that regardless of our professional training, regardless of our political ideas, concepts, conversations, regardless of the, you know, there are so many things that go into school leadership. There’s the resources, there are the ideologies of leadership, there are the tools, the techniques, the strategies, the platforms. All of those things help us be an excellent school leader. 

But at the end of it all, what it really comes down to is us, our thoughts about us, our thoughts about other people, our thoughts about our relationship with one another, with other people in relation to ourselves, how we see ourselves with other people, how we communicate with them, how we interact with them, what we believe about them, what we believe about ourselves, what we believe about everything. It comes down to our belief systems.

And one of the things that I teach in my programs and coach people on in my one-on-one sessions are on these belief systems, our identities, because the identity is truly the component that impacts your outcomes, what you believe you are capable of, what you believe you are able to do and not able to do, the limitations you believe are in the way, the lack of those limitations. All of those belief systems are working together which impact your decisions and your actions every single time.

So I was speaking with this client, and there are some deep-seated beliefs that we all have about ourselves, based on our past, based on our past experiences. And those little experiences are hidden down deep, and we don’t even realize how they are impacting today. The very decisions and actions that you take today can be founded in belief systems that were developed when you were very young. And I know you know this intellectually, right? We all know the inner child and past trauma work. There is a lot of research on this and work being done in the world around childhood issues and trauma issues, those kinds of things.

So, I was speaking with this client, and I’m sure these things come up for you as a school leader. You’re listening to a teacher and you’re like, I wonder where that fear is coming from, or I wonder why this behavior is happening. And when you start to wonder and you have conversations around it, you’ll find a belief system that is driving that person’s emotions, that person’s decisions, that person’s choice of approach will be founded in a belief system, every single time.

So, as I was working with this client, the conversation was around a male peer. It wasn’t a superintendent; it was a peer. So, principal to principal, direct peer, principal of one building, principal of another building. But there was a male-female component happening, and I bring that up because there were belief systems that came to the surface around this. 

So, you are going to have peers or you’ll have superiors, people who are at the district level, if you’re a site principal, directors, coordinators, assistant sups, sups. There will be people in your life, and you will have thoughts about them. You’ll have thoughts about yourself, thoughts in relation to them. And one of the thoughts that came to the surface was belief systems around authority.

Now, with this peer, there were thoughts around the circumstances involved. So I asked about those circumstances because I’m always curious to understand a person’s belief system. So, tell me the set of circumstances that are making you feel this way. Well, new versus veteran. I’m newer; they have this many years. 

So they know more, they have more experience, they don’t need my advice, they don’t want it. I don’t have as much wisdom to offer as somebody who is veteran. Do you see this? There’s a belief system around somebody’s years of experience. Here’s the belief system: years of experience equals smarter, wiser, better. It creates an unequal relationship, right? There’s inequity in the relationship. But it’s coming from the mind.

Who’s to say that somebody with more years of experience 100% is guaranteed more wisdom or better skill sets? And we know that’s true because we have teachers who’ve been teaching for a long time, and we wouldn’t label them as our most dynamic, impactful instructors. Years of experience does not equate to high performance, high effectiveness, empowerment. But we have belief systems around that. When it comes to us. 

When it’s somebody else, we’re like, “Oh, that’s amazing, years of experience, all these things. But little ol’ me?” Or when we’re a principal and we’re like, “Well, years of experience don’t mean anything, honey, because I’ve got a teacher here who needs some support, and they’ve been at this for a while,” okay? It just depends on the situation that we’re facing.

So, it’s interesting to notice what your thoughts are around authority because it will impact how you show up, the energy you’re in, the attitudes, the behaviors, the belief systems, the questions you ask or don’t ask, the approach that you take, how you feel about yourself, how you believe about yourself, and your capabilities. So in this case, I was recognizing through the belief systems that it felt like sibling energy, like a younger sibling energy. So the person I was working with was looking kind of up, putting this other person on a pedestal because they had more experience, also because they were male. They were bigger, they’re older, they know more. 

So like a younger sibling might look up to an older sibling and be like, “Wow, they’re so much bigger than me. They’re cooler than me. They’re older than me. They know more. They can do more. I’m just left behind. I’m smaller. I’m younger. My voice doesn’t matter. They get all the say. Like, they’re a bully because they’re older,” right? Our childhood brains do this. Well, we bring those belief systems into our workplace, into our professional decisions.

So it’s very important to acknowledge like when you’re feeling a certain way, whether it’s a positive emotion or a negative one, you want to understand why. What belief system is behind this emotion? When I’m feeling frustrated because somebody got a promotion, what’s the belief system that’s creating the frustration? Well, only internal candidates ever get hired. Belief system. All the males get promoted over the females. Belief system. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, good or bad, true, not true. It’s just curious and interesting. We want to notice this. Hmm, why do I think those things? Why do I believe this?

So when it comes to authority and figures of authority, we have very deep-rooted belief systems about authority because when we were little infants and we could not take care of ourselves, we had authority figures in our life caring for us, and we were very dependent on them. And when we were around our parents or our caregivers, extended family, community members were in positions of authority, we were taught things around authority, respect authority, right? If someone’s got title, status, positional power, like a superintendent, like a school board member, like other people in positions of authority, or your parents had positional authority over you, they had authority over you. 

It could be coaches, it could be mentors, auntie, uncle, the adults in your life as a child had authority over you. You have thoughts about authority, thoughts and opinions that are probably based way back when. It’s important to create awareness around them. Because when you don’t, you start behaving in certain ways, and you’re kind of like, “Why did I just do that? That was awkward or weird,” or “Why can’t I speak my peace? Why am I so afraid to speak up?” Probably belief systems and past experiences.

So, if you have issues with authority, and I’m saying this for my heart because I have huge authority issues. I continue to have them, and I’ve been working through them, obviously with my own coach and through the years. I have shifted many of those belief systems, but their roots are deep. So it still comes up. It’s not like we’re going to eliminate the belief system entirely until we’re ready to fully let it go and we’re ready to no longer believe. We feel safe enough to believe that we can be equals, that we can have a voice. 

So I was coaching this client on her thoughts around authority figures not, first of all, we had to define what authority figures were for her, but we also looked at, you know, what you make that mean and why your voice can’t be heard and why they don’t want to hear your voice and listen to your voice.

So if any of you out there are afraid to speak up in a meeting, if you are biting your tongue, holding back because of a belief system you have or a fear that you have, it’s okay to explore it in a safe environment before you decide, nope, no longer holding my tongue, and you go and unleash, right? You want to check it safely so that you can ground yourself. What is it that I really want? How do I want to be heard? What do I want to say? Why do I want to say it? So it’s important to understand how you personally define authority, how you define being heard, how you define wisdom, experience, when somebody has power or authority, what does that mean? What does that look like?

So really exploring what authority means to you, what it looks like for you, how you define it. So when we talk about power, and I talk about personal power, your personal power, we’re all gifted with personal power. Do we exercise that personal power and to what extent? And what limits us from exercising that personal power to feel empowered? We have a lot of thoughts around authority when it comes to utilizing our personal power and exercising and feeling empowered.

So I want to just dive into power real quickly. This is by no means a thesis; it’s just a crash course. But when we talk about people of authority and we have thoughts about that, we have emotions around that, we have belief systems around that, you want to explore that because you’ll start to see how your belief systems were rooted in a five-year-old brain mentality, the capacity of a five-year-old and what they’re making it mean, or a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old. You’ll see your meanings, your understandings, your experiences evolve as your life evolves. 

But we have a lot of fears around power, and rightfully so, because there have been people in positions of power and authority has been leveraged to cause pain, to cause harm, to cause fear and intimidation. So our body, when it responds with a fear-based reaction, especially when your nervous system gets involved, it’s not just cognitive fear, it’s actual like literal body, amygdala going crazy, nervous system dysregulation kind of fear. That’s normal. It’s trying to keep you safe. So we have to go back up into our prefrontal cortex and say, “Hey, let’s explore this fear. What is so scary about authority for me?” And explore it. What is scary about power?

So when I talk about personal power, what do I mean by power? What I mean by personal power is individuals have the power to think and believe whatever they want. They have the right, they have the power to do that. No one can come inside of your brain and change your mind. They can try to convince you, coerce you; they can do things externally so that you will follow along, or maybe you do change your mind, but it’s your agency when you change your mind. When somebody has a very convincing argument, you’re like, “Okay, I’m with you. I see that now. I agree.” They have provided you with compelling evidence enough for you to change what you’re thinking or what you believe. 

That’s why we read books. That’s why we listen to podcasts. That’s why we hire coaches. That’s why we go to school to learn. Teachers are exposing students to ideas, to concepts, to skill sets, and the kid’s like, “I can’t do that.” “Oh, wow, I can do that.” We keep exposing them. Two plus two is four. “Two plus two is four. Oh, I get it. Two plus two is four. I agree with you. I believe you. Now I know that two plus two is four.” But it’s the child, it’s the teacher, it’s the other person, it’s the person in position of authority, they have 100% agency to think and believe whatever they want. So yes, that is personal power.

They also have the power to do and say whatever they want, whether we like it or not. It’s their personal power. So people in positions of power, yes, they can think and believe whatever they want. They can do and say whatever they want. They also have the power to make any decisions they want, even decisions that impact us. Yes, they can. They have the power. They have the authority, internal authority and positional authority, external authority. And they have the power to implement those actions. They can implement actions that impact us. And they have the right to do that. They have internal agency, they have internal power, and they have positional power, which is external power. 

So yes, but here’s what else is true. In addition to, this is the land of and. You also have the power to think and believe what you want 100% of the time. Please don’t abdicate that power out to somebody else. Well, they told me to believe it. Well, that’s what they said, so I, you know, they made me believe this. No, take back your power. Take back your agency. You think and believe what you want. This is why I teach self-discernment and exercises around discerning for yourself what you want to think, what you want to believe.

We also have the power to say what we want and do what we want. We can say and do whatever we want. There are consequences to what we do and what we say, positive and negative, but you can speak. You can behave. You can do what you want. Most of us will do that within the realm of weighing out the consequences and discerning, is this a risk I’m willing to take? Is this a consequence I’m willing to risk? Yes or no? But we do have the power to do it. 

We also have our own power to make decisions that impact us and impact other people. Even a child has the right to think and believe what they want, to do and say what they want. We know this if anybody’s ever been around a toddler. 100% internal authority. They make decisions that impact you as their parent, positive and negative. They bring us the most joy, and they can bring us to tears. But they have the power. We all have internal power to implement our decisions, to implement actions that impact us, that impact them. We all have that power.

But at the same time, we don’t have power regardless of authority. And I want to make this clear and invite you into, you know, exploring your thoughts on authority. What people don’t have the power and what they can never have power over is our internal agency, our internal power. They can do something, we can still choose to believe what we want to believe, think what we want to think. Look at Mandela. He was in prison for years and years. He told his mind what to think about, what to focus on, what to believe. 

Even when he was imprisoned, we have the right and we have the power, and they will never have the power over what you do and what you say. They can be very convincing, they can be very intimidating on, you know, both ends, very inspiring. It makes you want to do and say things or very intimidating, which makes you want to do and say things. But at the end of the day, you make the decision about what you believe, how you feel, what you think about, what you say, what you do, how you behave, your attitude, your mood, your manners, how we feel about ourselves and others, the energy we decide to be in, what decisions we make or don’t make, what actions we take or don’t take, 100% ownership.

I know that’s hard. It’s very hard. But when we own that, that is what empowerment feels like. My boss said this, I decide how I respond. I decide how I’m going to feel. I decide my identity. I decide who I am in this moment. I’m going to decide with intentions. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting. It doesn’t mean you’re not afraid. But you’re looking at those emotions. Why am I hurt? Well, I want my boss to like me, or I’m embarrassed because my boss said it in front of my colleagues, and I want my colleagues to believe I’m a good principal. Why am I feeling fear? Why am I so afraid? 

Well, my thoughts on authority or my thoughts on what he could do, I could lose my job. Okay, so do I want to speak up at the risk of losing my job? Or do I want to believe that I can speak up in a way that’s respectful, and kind, and appreciative of his positional authority or her positional authority, and also see my fear and say, that is a possibility, but it’s less likely if I’m intentional with my words and the way I communicate.

No matter a person’s positional title or status, no matter what authority it grants them, their power can never truly disempower you. They cannot take your power away. You decide. And if you get let go, then you decide to be the person who gets hired right away and gets an even better job or a more desirable job, or wherever you are on the spectrum of belief about yourself, landing a job, whatever it takes. 

So what they do have control over, you might have thoughts and opinions about that. It might contradict what you believe. You might have strong feelings about their words, behaviors, decisions, actions, implementations. You have to be aware that your response to what’s happening with them… this is where I talk about two separate sets of emotions and steer cycles going on. There’s what they’re doing, thinking, believing, and saying, and then there’s over here what you’re doing, thinking, believing, and saying, and then there’s thoughts and opinions about the other.

So you might allow your beliefs to shift in reaction to them. You might allow your emotions to sway in reaction to them, or you might allow your decisions and actions to be in reaction to them. But that is different than being controlled by somebody. Having positional authority is different than the power to control you and your mind. 

So if you’re feeling like my voice isn’t heard, I lack power, I want you to look at both truths and give some equal airtime here because we’re leaning over to the younger sibling mindset only. I don’t mean that in a negative way. I love my younger sibling. It’s nothing to do with real siblings. It’s just that it’s the mentality I’m talking about, the little kid mentality, the immature version of our brains. If we look at the truth of the truth, both, yes, people have external power. They have external title, status, authority based on their positions, based on who they are. But we also have equal internal authority.

There is evidence in your life that your voice has been heard. One, you’re alive on the planet, which means you have a voice. Two, you have people in your life who care about your voice, whether that’s a friend, your family members, your colleagues, your spouse, your partner, your own kids. Somebody in your life cares about your voice. If you are in school leadership or even if you’re aspiring to become a school leader, which means you’re in education, people care about your voice. 

They care about what you have to say. Your teachers care, your parents care, your colleagues care, families care, students care. So play with this. Be with your belief systems on authority and explore them. Obviously, if you want more help with that, I can help you in a one-on-one setting or inside of EPC. We’ll dive into those belief systems that are limiting you, that are creating fear for you, and we’ll break them open and plug you back into your personal power. All right?

I know authority is scary. This is a lifelong work of mine, and it’s very empowering to explore this and break free of some of these fears and limitations that hold us back. Your voice is heard. Your voice is desired. We need you in this field. We want to hear what you have to say. We love you, and we wish you the most beautiful rest of your week. Have an amazing day. Talk to you next week. Take care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.

Hello, Empowered Principals. Welcome to episode 455. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not-so-typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach Angela Kelly. 

Hey there, Empowered Principals. You know what time of year it is. We’re going into the fall. And that means the fall dip is coming. Look, you’re not going to prevent the fall dip from happening. That’s not what flipping the fall dip is all about. I invite you to join us in Flip the Fall Dip 2026. We are hosting the Fall Dip throughout the month of September. So, September 16th, 22nd, and 29th, we are hosting the Fall Dip Series. 

Listen up school leaders, there’s no school that stays in complete flow 100% of the time. There’s no school culture that doesn’t have its ups and downs. And there’s no one leader out there who is preventing the fall dip and the energy in other people from shifting. It’s about navigating it. Leading through it and staying in alignment with your own leadership identity and integrity. Join us for the Fall Dip this coming September 16th. We’ll see you there.

Well, hello, my Empowered Principals. Happy Tuesday, and welcome to the podcast. Hey, if you’re brand new to the podcast, let’s give you a special shout-out. We are so happy you are here. I’d love to hear from you, whether that’s on Instagram at The Empowered Principal, Facebook, you can find me at Angela Kelly or the professional page, you know, the business page, Angela Kelly Coaching. You can find me on LinkedIn, wherever it is that you like to hang out. Just give me a shout-out and say, “Hey, heard the podcast,” or you can leave a comment below on your podcast platform, and I’ll be sure to write you back. I would love to say hello and meet you.

If you’ve been listening for quite a little bit of time, which is the last eight-plus years going on nine, thank you. We are friends. It’s wonderful to have you in the world of the Empowered Principal. We are doing things differently. We’re talking differently. We are believing in different things. We are in an energy and in a frequency of empowerment. We strive for that over here. We’re also having the human experience. So, we are here to feel better. When we feel better, we do better. And when we do better, we make an impact. So, welcome. I’m so glad you’re here.

All right, diving right in. I have personally been exploring the difference between these two concepts. I’m going to share them with you today and share you my thoughts to date as I’m exploring these because it was something I wasn’t aware of. And the first step to expanding ourselves, evolving ourselves, and empowering ourselves comes down to awareness. You don’t know something until you know it. We don’t know until we know. And once you know it, you can’t unsee it, and then you can contemplate it and explore it and just play around with it a little bit to come up with your own concepts, your own theories, your own ideas about what you want anything to mean to you.

So, I’ve been exploring the differences between hypervigilance and resilience because I had them very confused. I would have bet dollars that my hypervigilance was resilience. I would have bet you money on that, that I’m strong, I’m capable. I was listening to a podcast recently, and this person was sharing very deep trauma that had occurred to her. She was being interviewed, and she was very open and candid about the experiences she was going through or had been through or continued to experience. And she kept saying, “But I’m a strong person. I’m such a strong person.”

And it struck me because I have found myself saying in times of crisis, in times of stress, in times of trauma, “But I’m a strong person.” Like I’m such a strong person. Like, I’m so strong to be handling this abuse, or I’m so strong to be handling this toxic relationship, or I’m so strong to be handling this negative environment or negative situation. I’m such a strong person. And we tell ourselves that we’re such strong people. And school leadership, ooh, it can be traumatizing. It can be stressful. It can be exhausting. It can be very trying, and we will say to ourselves, “But I’m such a strong person.”

And that’s where I decided to create awareness around this. Like, what am I saying when I’m saying, “Well, I’m such a strong person?” Why am I saying I’m such a strong person? And for me, it was hypervigilance speaking. It was my protective shield coming up. But I’m such a strong person. I can take this. I can handle it. I can keep going. I’m resilient. So I was confusing and I was kind of clumping together resiliency with hypervigilance because hypervigilance, at least for me, feels very productive. I’m on. 

It’s like my adrenaline’s on, you know, 200%. I’m looking around. I’m on top of all the things. I’m getting up early. I’m knocking out chores in the morning. I’m working out hard. I’m getting the lunches ready. I’m driving to school. I’m listening to a podcast driving to school, and then I’m on it. Like I’ve got systems, morning routines in place and I’m like clockwork, and then I’m on top of kids being dropped off for the day and morning breakfast and, you know, recess and lunch and getting in those classrooms and oh, I all these IEP, like I’m working myself to death, but I’m on it.

And it felt very productive. It feels very responsible. It feels very in control. And as leaders, we believe as part of our identity that we are to be in control, that it is our responsibility and we should take ownership for things being in our control. I’m not saying we shouldn’t. I’m just acknowledging that take on ownership that all things should be functioning highly effective, systematic, efficient, working properly, thriving, everyone should be happy, everyone should be doing what they’re supposed to be doing, and if they’re not, that’s on us. There’s the leadership mindset for you, right?

And when I think back, my goal was just to stay on top of things. I created systems. Teachers, we create incredible systems. We’re very systematized people, or we wouldn’t go into teaching. And you see people who aren’t systematized who just love teaching for the sake of loving kids and they probably loved school as a kid and they’re very artistic. They might not have like organized systems that people like me would think are organized, but they have their own form of organization. So we do this to stay on track, to always be on guard to make sure that nothing goes out of place, nothing gets off the rails, that everything’s in alignment. Everything’s on.

So when I was tired, I pushed through. When I was frustrated, I pushed through. When I was miserable, hating life, I faked it and I pushed through. I pushed through everything. There were days I pushed through waking up, getting out of bed, going to work, then putting a smile on my face, trying to rally myself into positivity and trying not to be fake positive or toxic positive, but real positive, and what can I focus on? Oh, I can focus on how productive I am, how resilient I am. I tried to rally other people into staying on the positive train to keep going.

I saw myself as expanding, evolving myself, empowering myself, becoming the leader, being in the identity of. And in some ways, it was. I was expanding my capacity. I was expanding my capacity to do things when I was exhausted. I could show up to meetings after getting blasted at the last meeting and put a smile on my face and walk through. I considered that resiliency. I could agree when my mind was in full disagreement. I could say yes when my entire body was screaming no. 

So I was expanding my capacity, my capacity to disconnect from myself, to disassociate how I was feeling, to numb myself, to numb my mind, to numb my body, to just numb the emotions out, to disregard my own needs, my own physical needs, mental needs, emotional needs, social needs, my own discernment, my own ideas, my own compass. I was expanding my capacity to disconnect from all of that, disconnect from my discernment, my own ideas, my own compass. I was expanding my capacity to turn down my own volume, turn down my own voice, turn down my own way of leading.

I was also expanding my skill sets of inauthenticity, the skill set of misalignment, the skill set of fitting in. I was perfecting that. I wasn’t resilient. I was hypervigilant. I was doing everything in my power to control the things outside of me and to control all of the things around me, my whole campus. I was trying to control it all, whack-a-mole. You know the drill. But I was doing all of that because I was scared. I was afraid of negative consequences. I didn’t even know what those negative consequences would be, but I imagined them, and they were very scary in my mind.

These were all the things that I guessed would happen if I messed up. My boss firing me, being berated publicly on social media, online, in the newspaper somewhere publicly, on the front news, front page of the news, on the 6:00 news, right? I was so afraid of rejection, of being scolded, of being reprimanded publicly, especially publicly, that was really like a big fear of mine. It was one thing, like, I could be hypervigilant in a meeting with just me and my boss and take that, but publicly, you just feel ashamed and humiliated, right?

I was worried teachers weren’t going to like me, so I wanted to people please. I was so mad when parents would go above my head because I meant that I failed at my job. I feared everything. I feared being rejected. I feared being attacked. I feared being held responsible for things that weren’t mine to own and then being mad about that and resentful. I was so afraid of being labeled incompetent. 

So what did I do? Go on hypervigilance mode because I didn’t want to feel those feelings. Into survival mode I went, using that hypervigilance strength. It was a strength of mine at the time, as a protective shield because I thought, okay, if I just stay on top of everything, do it for as long as it takes, for as long as I have energy, I’ll be safe. Things are going to be okay. I would be liked, I’d keep my job, everything would be cool. I wouldn’t ruffle any feathers, cause any waves. So just go underground, do my job, and stay protected.

But what I have learned is that hypervigilance is being on guard all times in the name of resilience. It’s not resolving those past pains or the fears that you have or looking them in the eye and noticing what you’re actually afraid of or why you’re actually afraid of it or if it’s even a real threat, or if you’re just making it up in your mind. Hypervigilance is avoiding those potential fears at all costs because you’re so afraid to experience the emotions that you’ve had in the past once again. 

So if somebody’s broken your heart, you don’t want to date anymore. Why? You don’t want to be heartbroken again. So you’re going to be hypervigilant, not going to go on those dating apps. You’re not going to go on a live date for heaven’s sakes. You’re just going to resolve that you are going to be single for the rest of your days, and that is very sad, but that’s who you must be. So your resiliency is that you’re strong enough to be a single woman for the rest of your life versus, do I want to be single or not?

If I want to be single and I choose it and it feels good, that’s different than I’m never dating again because I’m too afraid to have my heart broken again. So if you want to go on a date, but you don’t think you can handle it, or all you can think about is the past breakup and the heartbreak that you experienced, then you’re in hypervigilance mode. It’s a different fuel driving your decisions and actions because it’s coming from the fuel of fear. 

For those of you who are familiar with my podcast, I talk a lot about road trips. I talk a lot about being on the journey and stopping at the gas station, and you decide which type of fuel you’re going to put in your tank, your energy tank. And the energy tank can get filled with any emotional energy you want, fear, pain, resentment, frustration, anger, happiness, joy, delight, satisfaction, motivation, drive, empowerment, pick the fuel. But the one driving hypervigilance is fear. Deep fear. I’m not saying it’s unwarranted fear. I’m simply saying we’re acknowledging that it is fear.

Resilience is a different fuel. It’s assuredness. This fuel is based in trust and faith and belief and capacity, capability, empowerment. It is working with the emotions and through the emotions. It’s exploring how you feel, why you feel it, what’s making you feel the way you do, understanding why you feel the way you do and choosing with intention to allow those emotions to be a part of your human experience, to process them, to look them in the eye. 

Hey, you know, resentment, what’s coming up? Let’s talk about this. Hey, heartbreak. Let’s look at this. What’s coming up? What can I learn from you? What wisdom do you have for me? What do I need to know for next time? Because I’m going on another date. So let’s talk about it now. Sit down and have a conversation with those feelings. You process it, you learn from it because then you can release it.

Resilience equals released pain. It’s a release. It’s trusting that you can allow and process any emotion, that you’re not afraid to have them because you know how to handle them. It’s faith that you will figure out whatever comes your way. It’s not trying to avoid them from coming your way. It’s saying, if they come my way, I will figure it out. I’ll be okay. I’ll handle it. It’s taking the wisdom from those past mistakes and those pain points and leveraging them when you come across a new challenge. It is having the patience for yourself and for others as we are all navigating the human experience.

Resilience is true strength. It is confidence that you can handle uncharted territory. It is the belief that you are okay, that you’ll be okay, that you are okay right now in this moment. Even though you feel fear, even though you feel worried, doubt, confusion, overwhelm, you are okay. You are safe. You can remind your brain that. You’re doing what you need to do. You’re doing enough. You’re being sufficient in this moment.

When we’re hypervigilant, we haven’t reconciled with the past, with those past pains and those past experiences. We are simply looking to avoid, defend, and protect. We’re on guard. That’s why your nervous system is on high alert. That’s why your body responds to stress. You get hypertension. You might have pain management issues in your neck, shoulders, back, legs even, or your hips, a lot of hips and joint issues when we’re holding on to a lot of stress. When we’re hypervigilant all the time, the body can’t relax. It can’t rest. It’s always on alert. There’s never a moment to rest and recover.

But when we’re resilient, we understand that the painful moments that we all experience, no one’s exempt from them, they are essential parts of our lives. We understand that they’re temporary. They don’t last forever. We see that we are equipped to handle them. We acknowledge that they provide us wisdom and guidance. We realize we’re okay even when we’ve experienced something that wasn’t okay.

Coaching helps you shift from reacting in hypervigilance mode to resilient mode. You don’t try to prevent hard things from happening. You understand that when they do happen, you are built to process it, learn from it, and overcome it. This is the work we do in the world of the Empowered Principal through one-on-one coaching, through group coaching, and through the academy. This is the work that you learn. For me, it is the work that works. I invite you into EPC. We would love to have you. Have a beautiful week. Take great care of yourselves, and we’ll see you next week.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.

Hello, Empowered Principals. Welcome to episode 453. 

Welcome to The Empowered Principal® Podcast, a not-so-typical educational resource that will teach you how to gain control of your career and get emotionally fit to lead your school and your life with joy by refining your most powerful tool, your mind. Here’s your host, certified life coach Angela Kelly. 

Hey there, Empowered Principals. You know what time of year it is. We’re going into the fall. And that means the fall dip is coming. Look, you’re not going to prevent the fall dip from happening. That’s not what flipping the fall dip is all about. I invite you to join us in Flip the Fall Dip 2026. We are hosting the Fall Dip throughout the month of September. So, September 16th, 22nd, and 29th, we are hosting the Fall Dip Series. 

Listen up school leaders, there’s no school that stays in complete flow 100% of the time. There’s no school culture that doesn’t have its ups and downs. And there’s no one leader out there who is preventing the fall dip and the energy in other people from shifting. It’s about navigating it. Leading through it and staying in alignment with your own leadership identity and integrity. Join us for the Fall Dip this coming September 16th. We’ll see you there.

Well, hello, my Empowered Principals. Happy Tuesday. Welcome to the podcast. I’m going to invite you all to buckle up. We’ve got a juicy topic today. And I’m on fire. I’m ready to go. We’re going in deep, but I really encourage you to listen to this concept, to contemplate it deeply, and to make an intentional decision at the end of this podcast. To sit with yourself and feel this podcast and make an intentional, conscious decision about your next steps for the upcoming year.

So I woke up this morning and I had the biggest aha. Now, as I’m recording this, for those of you who are into, I don’t know, energies outside of the human experience, things that are bigger than us. I’m currently recording this during the Lion’s Gate, the portal that started on August 8th of 2026, so 8/8, 2 + 6 is 8, 8/8/8. And it goes through August 12th of 2026. Today is August 11th, as I’m recording this. 

So, you’re hearing it just a few weeks later. But I have felt tremendous shifts in myself, tremendous shifts in the way I’m thinking, the way I’m feeling, my identity has expanded in the last few days. And when this happens to me, I have profound deep thinking. And I feel like I’m downloading information, downloading codes, downloading content, concepts, ideas to share with all of you that take our leadership to such a deeper level.

And this was one of those mornings. As I was getting ready this morning, I was actually going to go and take a walk. I’m down at the beach in Santa Cruz, was going to go take a walk, and then run my errands early in the morning. I love to run errands early in the morning, before all the peoples and all the traffic. I just get in, get out, and then I come home and I can do what I love, which is coaching, creating, and contemplating life. However, this content downloaded into my brain as I was looking in the mirror. So, my entire morning schedule changed.

Of course, this time of year in particular, I’m always thinking about school and school leadership and how to empower school leaders to embrace change, to embrace empowerment, to embrace our fears, and to be able to move ourselves forward. So I was thinking about this time of the school year, all the PD that’s going on, all the guest speakers, all the energy of a new school year, the to-do list, the onboarding, the training, all the hype, the hope, the dreams, the promises. 

Everything feels fresh and new. This actually is such a great time of year. It feels so good. It feels good every year, most years. Some people are like, don’t drag me back to school. But because we say don’t drag me back to school, I don’t want summer to end. How did summer go so fast? And now we’re back in the routines and the throes of a new school year, we create hype. We create positivity and energy and we bring in the motivational speakers and we try to make PD as happy as possible.

And then, my brain fast forwarded to about a month from now, middle of September. I want you to stay with me here. Fast forward to the middle of September. I’m recording this mid-August. You’re going to hear this, I’m going to drop it at the beginning of September because I want you thinking about this before the fall dip, which happens around mid-September into early October. People start reaching out for coaching because they’re exhausted, they’re overwhelmed, they’re frustrated, they’re confused, they’re deflated, they’re discouraged, they’re disappointed. 

One month from now and this school year, this brand new energy, all this hype, all this vibe becomes just another school year. Another year of struggles, another year of obstacles, another year of discipline issues, another year of staff resistance, another year of parent frustrations and painful meetings. Another year of overworking, of overextending yourself, overexerting yourself, over scheduling yourself. 

Another year of mediocre outcomes. And I was like, wow, ouch. That even hurts my soul to think that hundreds of thousands of school leaders all around the globe are in the hype of a new school year and one month from now, they’re going to be in the despair of the same, of the mediocracy, of the rinse and repeat. So I kept digging.

Why do we as school leaders repeat this pattern? Why? Honestly, I think the hype feels good. It’s exciting. It’s hopeful. It’s the boost energetically that we need to get all of the school year kickoff things completed. It’s the energy that we want to be in for the start of the year because it feels good. We like the high vibe. We don’t want to focus on what doesn’t feel good, right away off the bat, because it doesn’t set a good tone for the year. 

So, what we do is we try to amp up the vibe. We create initiatives. We host curriculum PD. We bring in motivational speakers. We offer tablets to all the students. We promise all the things. We’re going to take things off the plate this year. We’re going to hyper focus on one thing and not try to be great at everything. We make all these promises. We say all these things. We give teachers donuts and coffee and maybe we buy them some supplies for their classroom that we didn’t buy last year because we want them to feel good. We want them to be happy they’re here. We want to create a positive culture, right? 

So we will hire more support staff as the budget allows. We’ll do all these things, right? And these things are good. Aren’t you saying, yes, those are good. We should be doing those things, right? Yeah. Actually, they can be good if they’re implemented with intention and with purpose, but they’re not inherently good. They are not inherently the answer. They’re actually neutral. They can be good, and they can be nothing. They can be not helpful. They can be a detriment, actually, a distraction. They can be the thing that we tell ourselves, well, we’re doing the right things, we’re doing the work, but really, we’re just putting on facades and band-aids and plugging holes and whack-a-moling.

And that’s why there is almost always a fall dip because there’s this rocket takeoff energy that boosts us into the year. We ramp up, we hype up, and what happens? Then there’s the rest of the school year. There’s the crash. There’s the fall dip, and then there’s a dip every season. We kind of like ramp up in the school year, and then we have a fall dip. And then we catch our breath at Thanksgiving and the holidays and we kind of ramp back up in January and then we crash February, March. 

Big crash in March usually because we’re worried about what we haven’t covered and the test is coming and all that we have left to do and we’re tired and we just want the year to end. We want the test to be over. And then we get through the test and then we have this another ramp up and then, you know, we kind of like float on fumes until we cross the finish line at the end. We know the pattern. So why do we repeat this pattern even when we can with accuracy predict the outcome and the experience year after year?

Here’s what I believe. Here’s what I downloaded. I believe it comes down to awareness resistance. It is our resistance as humans. All of us do this to becoming more aware. It is wanting to feel good about the things that don’t feel good. So we try to make them feel good. We ra ra siss boom ba, we hype things up. We deflect. We focus on what is working. We distract ourselves with feel good things. We avoid the things that don’t feel good. We stick our heads in the sand. And we gravitate to what feels familiar, what feels predictable, what feels safe, what feels expected.

We know what to expect this time of year, and we actually desire the familiar. We desire the hype because it’s what we know. It’s what we’re used to. It’s what we expect. We look forward to that predictability because it’s comforting. It’s almost nostalgic. It’s known. It’s safe. When you think about all of the years that you have experienced the energy of a brand new year, you’ve been experiencing that since you were five. 

The hype of your very first year going to kindergarten and getting the supplies and going to, you know, kindergarten roundup back in my day, the whole brand new experience of going to school and the hype, getting going clothing shopping or supply shopping and your mom’s all excited because you’re going to school. Or she’s crying because you’re going to school, she doesn’t want to see her baby going. But there’s a nostalgia there.

And then what happens? Around the time school ends in June, back to school supplies are in the in the targets and the Walmarts and the Costco’s of the world. And we’re like, what? School just ended. Now there’s back to school. Yes, we love it. We like the back to school shopping. We like the getting the new clothes and the new shoes and the new backpacks. It’s fun. It’s nostalgia. We like it. And now we’re teachers and we loved that feeling. We actually perpetuate it because it’s familiar, because it feels good. It’s cozy, it’s fun, it’s a delightful feeling. 

The beginning of the school year is all about a routine, a habit, a pattern of behavior. We are on autopilot. We don’t question that because it feels good. It feels familiar. Or, and this was me as a teacher to be honest, like after a few years in, you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, here’s the deal. I know, go to the PD, we get the keynote speaker that ra ra’s us. Feel good, be joy, be happy, be authentic, be yourself. Have a wonderful year when we cheer ourselves on and we’re like, yep. And we like it. We reconnect with our friends. We’re now veteran teachers and we’re, we know the drill. We know what to get done. I remember that. It still felt good. I liked the familiar.

If somebody had come in and shaken it all up and started talking about feelings and started talking about, like, let’s expose ourselves and let’s create awareness, I would have been like, what the heck is going on? No, this is not how the school year starts. Wrong. We don’t question it. We want it to be familiar. We want it to be the routine, so we can go on autopilot. So what we do because it feels familiar and it feels good, we focus on all the hype and all the excitement in order to not think about the inevitable just yet, by the way. 

We know the dip is coming, but we don’t want to think about that. We want to be happy because we have a lot of stuff to do. We’ve got to get our classrooms ready. We’ve got to get the campus ready. We’ve got to get teachers onboarded, systems in place, site plans in place. We’ve got to get the class list, the master schedule. We got stuff to do. We can’t be thinking about the work, the inevitable that’s coming, okay?

This is also why, on a personal note, we don’t look at our bank accounts, or we don’t step onto the scale. It’s why we pretend nothing’s wrong in our marriage or in our relationships. It’s why we allow that friend to mistreat us once in a while and just kind of blow it off and go back to the good times. It’s why we don’t have that conversation with our own children if we’re suspecting something, but we want everything to be okay. 

It’s why we don’t have the conversation with our boss. We just want to pretend it’s not necessary. It’s why we don’t have those conversations with teachers and kids and parents. Awareness resistance is the fight we have within ourselves, or collectively, actually, that has us actively avoiding being aware of the facts, aware of the outcomes we’ve created, aware of the path that we’re currently on. 

So I think of awareness resistance is, I don’t want to know how much I weigh, because that exposure to that fact, the number on that scale, would be so painful based on what I make it mean about me, based on what other people will make it mean, based on the work I have to do to fix it, to change it, the fact that I think it’s wrong to weigh that much, the fact that other people have been telling me that I’m getting fat or that I’ve gotten bigger or my clothes size has had to go up, but I don’t want to look on the scale because what would that mean about me? 

What is that about my identity that I don’t want to know? I don’t want to step on the scale because of the pain of the truth, the pain of the exposure, the vulnerability that comes with it. 

Awareness resistance can also be collective. I do think we have it in our schools. We collectively don’t want to create awareness because we don’t want to not feel good. We don’t want to be in pain. We don’t want to face the number because of what we make it mean, because of what we fear others make it mean about us. We fear about our identity, our capacity, our capability. We fear the effort required. We think it’s going to be so much work to lose the ten pounds or the 20 pounds or the five pounds. Doesn’t even matter the number. Oh god, how painful will it be to know that I weigh five pounds more than I want to think that I weigh. 

How painful would it be to look and see that the patterns of our behaviors at school are flatlining results or are not helping children become more emotionally resilient, emotionally capable, or academically capable, that we have been throwing money at things or resources at things or people, you know, hiring more staff or hiring more curriculum or, you know, paying for more curriculum or buying more materials and when that doesn’t work, we don’t want to see that that doesn’t work because it’s painful. So let’s just focus on the hype of this time of year because it feels good, at least for a moment. Let’s not think about a month from now.

Why don’t we want to know something? Wouldn’t we want to know the steer cycle behind what’s going on here? And the steer cycle for those of you who might be new to this podcast, the steer cycle is a tool that I teach. It’s about, it’s an awareness tool, speaking of awareness resistance. It’s about looking at our thoughts and our belief systems, looking at our feelings, our emotions, paying attention to them, leveraging them, understanding them, using them to guide us. It’s about the energy we’re in, the energetic state we’re fueling our actions with, the decisions and actions we’re making and the outcomes we’re creating. 

It’s looking at that cycle. Wouldn’t we want to know what’s holding us back from achieving our goals? Intellectually, we do want to know. People will come and say to me, just tell me what to do. Tell me what I’m doing wrong and I’ll fix it. Intellectually, we want to know how to lose the ten pounds, how to save more money, how to get teachers on board, how to create positive culture, how to help students in their literacy rates in their mathematical abilities, in their comprehension of social dynamics, of the interaction of the history of our country. We can go to all the places. Intellectually, we want to. We can say on the surface, yes, I want to know. Tell me. But emotionally, emotionally, we don’t want to know.

And this is at every level within our school districts, every level of education. Doesn’t matter the position you hold. It’s a human experience. So we will say to one another, yes, let’s expose this. Let’s find out. Let’s be vulnerable. Let’s know what’s going on here so we can fix it. Let’s just fix it. But emotionally, we’re like, this sounds terrifying. I would rather crawl in a hole for the rest of my life than expose this, then look at this, then create awareness around it. This feels like life or death. I’m going back into the cave because I could be exposed to the sunlight, the sun burning my skin, to getting mosquito bites and bee stings, to being eaten by a lion. 

Absolutely not. I know I’m starving. I know I’m hungry. The solution is go out and hunt, but that is so freaking scary. I could die. No, thank you. That is what our brain is thinking. That’s what the amygdala is thinking. Right? The primitive part of our brain is like, heck no. I will override that prefrontal cortex every single time because I’m not going to get eaten by a lion, not today.

So we don’t really want awareness because it is vulnerable. It exposes us. I just can envision like cavemen and women going out, barely wearing anything, not having any sunscreen, not even having hats, running around in a little coverup. I don’t know what they were. You know, sheepskin or something with no shoes and being exposed to the sun, exposed to the heat, exposed to the elements, exposed to all the bugs and the creatures and the snakes and the spiders and the oh my. And then lions and tigers and bears on top of it. 

But the call, the need to eat is so compelling because you’re going to die in the cave of starvation or you’re going to die, potentially, you’re exposed to the awareness of having to learn how to hunt and learning the tricks of the trade and bringing food in. So you’re either going to potentially die or you’re going to for sure die.

And that’s what awareness resistance does. When we’re in resistance, we’re in the cave. We don’t want to go out for fear of potentially being attacked or getting sunburned or getting swarmed by bees. So we just decide it’s safer in here. Those elements aren’t in here, but in that decision, in our unwillingness to be exposed to, to be aware of all that’s out in the world and going on the adventures, we stay in here, and we literally rot away. We stagnate, we rot away, we starve to death. And look, I get it. 

Emotionally, vulnerability is the biggest fear we ever have. It exposes us. It’s the scariest thing for a human to experience. It’s the fear of being seen as weak, incompetent, incapable, unsuccessful. Think of the cavemen and women that went out. If they didn’t come back, they were incapable. They were unsuccessful. Their fellow cavemates thought they were incompetent. They were seen as weak if they got eaten. Yeah, they were weak. They were the weaker of the two. Lion versus man. You might be seen as a failure in public. 

Failure to your community, to your families, to your staff, students. You might be seen as a fraud or an imposter. There will be public embarrassment, public shame, public humiliation. We fear that more than life itself, oftentimes. But it’s like, okay, I’m just going to, at least in here, I’m starving inside the cave, but nobody has to witness it. Nobody has to see it. Just me and maybe my closest people. But I don’t have to be exposed. My fears, my incompetencies, my incapacities, my lack of success, I don’t have to put it on display. I can just come in here and have a private death. Right?

So we know how exposure makes us feel. We worry how people will interpret that exposure. We worry what we will think about ourselves and what others will think of us, what we’re going to make it mean about us now, us and our future, what we made it mean about our past. We’re not sure we can handle it. We make it very personal. We make the test scores personal. We make feedback very personal. We make it mean we’re insufficient, we’re wrong, we’re not good enough. We make it mean that the other person thinks poorly of us. 

We think that we cannot change our identity, that it’s permanent, that everyone will see our flaws, our mistakes, and they will forever hold it against us. Our brain loves to believe that experiences are permanent, emotions are permanent, situations are permanent. We don’t see them as temporary. We don’t see them as fleeting, but they are. But when you’re in it, it feels like forever, right?

Now look, these emotions, failure, disappointment, discouragement, exposure, embarrassment, shame, humiliation, those emotions, they are unbearable in private. Notice, if you’re in the cave, you’re still feeling all the feelings. You’re just doing it in private. That’s hard enough. It’s hard to look in the mirror and say, I failed. I misspoke. I misstepped. I got it wrong. I am wrong in this. This is not how I want to be. I messed up. It is so painful to look in the mirror and say that. It’s hard to do it with ourselves, let alone acknowledging it ourselves and then going out and saying, hey, you know what staff? I got this wrong. 

Or, you know what? I didn’t say that in a way that feels good for me or for you. And I’m sorry about that. Let me repair this. Let me get this right. I’m here to get it right. I think Brene Brown says that. You know, I’m not here to be right. I’m here to get it right as long as it takes. That is painful. It’s hard to face those emotions alone in the cave hiding in private, trying to mask who you are, wearing a facade, faking it till we make it, pretending everything’s okay. That’s hard enough. But then to amplify that emotional experience by feeling the feelings and exposing them in front of others, ouch. No wonder we lean into awareness resistance.

And because we are empathetic and compassionate human beings, we all know the painful exposure, how it feels, the experience of it. We as leaders will mask it, we’ll dilute it, we’ll turn down the volume or avoid it altogether and ramp up the feel good feels. 

So we fall back on the familiar because it provides relief from the exposure. It’s like being in the sun all day, no shade, no water, no reprieve, and then six hours later, somebody comes along with an ice chest of cold waters and an umbrella and some sunscreen and probably some aloe vera because you’re burnt. It’s relief. So we fall back onto it because it provides us that relief and we’ll go back into awareness resistance, oftentimes very subconsciously. We’re not even aware we’re slipping in and out of awareness.

Now, look, humans weren’t designed for 100% awareness 100% of the time. We go in and out of awareness. But it’s not wanting to know. It’s knowing but not wanting to know. It’s not wanting to be aware. I don’t want to look at my bank account. I already know I’ve got bills I can’t pay or I already know that I’m in debt or I already know that I’ve overspent this month. I already know I have credit cards to deal with. I already know it, but I don’t want to look at it. I don’t want to feel it. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to be aware. 

And I don’t want to have to come up with a solution. The solution feels more painful than the hiding from it. There is a benefit to awareness resistance. You don’t have to fix anything if you’re not aware of it. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to feel anything. If you don’t look at your bank account, you don’t have to feel those feelings. If you don’t look at the scale, you don’t have to feel those feelings.

This is why in school we don’t really talk about feelings. It’s why we don’t teach about emotions and emotional regulation and emotional resilience and emotional bandwidth and emotional expansion. Because doing so makes us uncomfortable. And it’s also why we spend our entire school year in dysregulation, nervous system dysregulation, mental dysregulation, physical dysregulation, emotional dysregulation. 

The leaders are doing it, parents and teachers are doing it, support staff’s doing it, students are doing it because we don’t want to be aware of the emotional component to the teaching, learning, and leading experience. It is why we don’t make progress. It’s why we don’t move forward. This is why the school year, in a month from now, and in a few weeks as you’re listening to this from now, is going to be on rinse and repeat.

So, now that we’re talking about awareness resistance and we have awareness around awareness resistance, what do we do? Well, we make a decision. We either lean into the awareness or we retract from the awareness and lean back into resistance. We put up the shield or we take it down. We go out of the cave or we stay in. We make a decision. So as you’re listening to this and contemplating what I’m saying and what I’m offering here, there is a decision to be made. We all have the decision in our personal lives, in our professional lives. 

We can act in spite of all the fears and the chatter in our brain. We can act on the awareness journey regardless of those fears. They’re coming along with us by the way. And we want to be courageous by focusing on the truth of awareness, the outcomes of awareness, and the benefits of awareness. Or we can put our head back in the sand, go back into the cave, and we can lean back into resistance. Put on the shield, put on the facade, put on the protection gear, wrap yourself in bubble wrap, and rinse and repeat. That’s an option.

And I know it’s an option because we’ve been doing it for decades, if not centuries in school. Let’s not talk about racism. Let’s not talk about systemic oppression. Let’s not talk about things that are uncomfortable. Let’s not talk about sex trafficking in our schools. Let’s not talk about emotional, mental, physical abuse. Let’s not talk about the unhappy things. Let’s not talk about the fact that black and brown kids are not learning in the same way, at the same time. Let’s look at the disparity and stay focused on it. Why are our scores flatlining? We have the resources, or we don’t. 

Looking at the truth, looking at the facts, and having the skill set and the capacity to not make it mean that we are incapable. The truth is that we’re only incapable when we don’t look at the facts. That’s what makes us incapable. When we look at the facts and we expose them and we don’t make it mean that we’re not capable, we don’t make it mean something’s wrong with us, we make it mean there’s a situation we’d like to enhance or improve. Now we’re looking at expanding our awareness and expanding our capacity to feel, expanding our capacity to be exposed and move forward anyway, go out of the cave. 

Let’s go seek food because I want to live. I want to explore. I want to expand my life. I want to have experiences. I want to evolve. I want to live my life while I’m alive as a human. The truth is that it is much more courageous and empowered to lean into awareness. The truth is that it is less harmful to lean into awareness than our brain anticipates. Our brain is going to tell us, no way. It’s very, very scary. But it’s actually less harmful than we think it will be.

The truth is that we are equipped to handle awareness. We have everything we need inside of us to handle the awareness and the emotions that come with it. And the truth is that the emotions we experience with awareness are temporary. The pain, the embarrassment, the shame, the guilt, the frustration, the disappointment, the discouragement, the defeat, those are all temporary. But on the other side of that awareness are the empowered emotions that we want to feel. 

So the outcomes of awareness must outweigh the fears. And the outcomes of awareness are freedom, success, satisfaction, influence, impact, making a difference. The benefits of that, when you are creating the outcomes of freedom, independence, empowerment, success, satisfaction, influence, impact, the benefits are an expansion of empowerment, of yourself and of your students and your staff. It’s living a life and a career that is a legacy. It’s being a role model for the empowerment of your staff and your students, aligning to the intentions of education, the intent to empower.

So, this school year for you can be one of rinse and repeat, one of new year, same results, or it can be a year of awareness, a year of vulnerability, yes, a year of navigating emotions, yes, but also a year of expansion and growth, a year of emotional evolution, a year of strength and skill building, a year of actual progress. And yes, I’m with you. I’m just as scared as the next human on the planet. It is scary to drop our resistance to awareness, to drop the shield, to go out of the cave. That is scary. I’m admitting that right here. 

But it’s equally as scary to resist awareness, to stay in the cave, to starve to death, to not evolve, to not grow, to not live, to not even try. Dropping the resistance, going out of the cave, dropping the resistance, being exposed, being vulnerable, it ends with growth, progress, goal achievement, next level experiences, journeys, empowerment, adventures, misadventures. It leads to a full life of leadership. It leads to a full life of experiences in your career.

And what resistance doesn’t tell you up front, when it offers like, here’s some protection, here’s some safety, just rinse and repeat, do the same things, focus on what feels safe, what feels good, you know, what feels familiar. What resistance does not tell you, this is the fine print, is that awareness will never go away. It will never give up. It will keep inviting you in. It will keep knocking on your door. It will keep calling you until you answer, because awareness is always the solution. It’s always going to try to reach you, to remind you, to get a hold of you. It will never stop trying. 

So you can be in resistance for a lifetime if you want. I’ve seen people do it. They hold on to their beliefs about themselves and others. There are beliefs that people have about the color of people’s skin. There are beliefs people have about women. There are beliefs people have about our country versus another country. There are beliefs people have about how the government should be run, how schools should be run, how families should engage or not engage, how feelings should be expressed. 

There are people who will spend a lifetime holding on to their resistance, holding on to the familiar, the safe, the comfortable, to never exploring. They spend a lifetime trying to escape the feelings. They try to hide their perceived imperfections. They don’t want other people to know. They don’t want to be exposed. They project onto other people. They never lean into awareness. You can spend an entire lifetime doing it. I’ve seen people do it. I’ve had people in my family do it. I’ve had friends who’ve done it for their entire lives. 

And I’m sure you work with people who have no desire for awareness. But awareness will not stop trying because awareness is the relief. Resistance is the temporary protection. Just because you put sunscreen on once, just because you stay in the cave once, doesn’t mean you’re forever protected. The lion could actually come inside and find you there. You don’t know. But awareness is going to keep knocking because it’s the very thing we need to know in order to have what we want, in order to create what we want. It’s the solution to our problems. It’s the path that moves us forward.

So here’s some encouragement. You are in control of the level of awareness exposure that you have, that you create for yourself. You get to decide how much to take on, how much awareness to take on and when to pause that awareness, go back in the cave, take a breath, take a minute, take a rest, process the feelings, and then go back out. You navigate that. 

You are in the driver’s seat of how much exposure, how much you want to explore your awareness and your expansion and when you need to come back in for a rest. No one stays out forever. We all come in for a rest. That’s normal. But you are in the driver’s seat of that. No one can expose you to awareness you don’t want to be exposed to. You’re in charge of that. So you decide.

And schools that make the most progress have leaders who say yes to awareness, leaders who have the courage to take their head out of the sand. They step out of the cave. They look beyond what’s predictable, what’s safe, what they think is safe, by the way. But they’re people who will lean into the understanding that going out of the cave and being aware and creating awareness and understanding of the world outside of us and the facts and what we need to do and the skills we need to learn, that exposing those flaws, like I don’t know how to hunt for food, but in order to know how to hunt for food, I have to not know first because I have to go out and expose myself and not know in order to know. 

Exposing your flaws, they’re not announcing to the world that you’re insufficient. Leaning into the awareness is exposing you to solutions. So you can see it as I’m announcing to the world as I come out of the cave that I don’t know what I’m doing. And then now everybody knows I don’t know. Okay, but that’s the only way to know. It’s the path. It’s the path to the solutions. Exposing yourself, dropping the resistance is actually exposing what you are capable of. It’s exposing your strength, your courage, your resilience. 

It’s dropping the limitations that are in your mind. Sitting in the cave, oh my god, I’m so scared. I’m so afraid. I don’t want anybody to know I’m incapable. All of that chatter, going out into the world helps you drop those limitations in your mind. Because what you’re doing is resisting success, resisting answers, resisting strengths, solutions, resisting experiences.

Awareness doesn’t necessarily become less scary. It’s not less scary to step out of the cave. To the brain, it will always see awareness as a threat, as an exposure which is unsafe and vulnerable, which is why it literally feels like life or death. But what awareness does is it becomes something you understand, something you’re able to identify and recognize its patterns. It’s something you learn how to navigate and how to handle. 

And in that exposure to the experience of bringing yourself into awareness, that becomes the new familiar, the new normal, the new identity, the new way of being, the new comfort zone. Oh, I’m familiar with this. I’m feeling exposed. I’m feeling vulnerable. I know what to do. I know how to hunt. I know how to protect myself from the sun. I know what to do when I get lost. I know that that berry is toxic and this berry is good to eat because I’m aware.

The Empowered Principal Collaborative makes awareness less scary, less painful, less limiting. We bring levity to the awareness, lightness to being exposed to the light, to coming out of the cave. We do it together, hand in hand. In strength, in numbers, we come out and in our vulnerability, in our collective vulnerability, we see the light, we see the levity, we see the humor at our own human tendencies. 

So, Empowered Principals, you have a decision to make right here, right now. You can lean into awareness or you can stay in resistance. I invite you to come out of the cave and join us in the Empowered Principal Collaborative for the entire year. Be with us. We’ll go in the cave, we’ll come out. We’ll be out together exploring, we’ll come in and process. We’ll go back out, we’ll come in. We’re going to figure this out together, one step at a time, one exposure at a time, one level of awareness at a time. Have an empowered school year. I invite you in to dropping the awareness resistance. Have a beautiful week. Take care. Bye.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Empowered Principal® Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, please visit AngelaKellyCoaching.com where you can sign up for weekly updates and learn more about the tools that will help you become an emotionally fit school leader.